Infinite Metabolism: Lispector’s Consumptions

The following essay appears in Cynthia Cruz’s new book, Disquieting: Essays on Silence (Book*hug, 2019)

---

“To feed” is the most basic verb, the most fundamental, the most rooted. It expresses the primordial activity, the primary, basic function, the act “I” engage in even before I am born or begin breathing. Because of it I belong to the earth, forever. Like the smallest animal crawling in the dirt, like the smallest plant, I began by feeding myself.
—François Julien

How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?
—Michel Foucault

What I do with sustenance defines me. By consuming, I become that which I consume. When the infant takes in her mother’s milk, she becomes her mother. When I eat, I be-come one with what I eat. And I become that which what I eat derives from. In other words, that which I swallow, swallows me. As Novalis writes, “All enjoyment, all taking in and assimilation, is eating, or rather: eating is nothing other than assimilation.”

To live in a culture is to eat its norms and beliefs. I take in all that is in the culture—through media, through constant socialization, through the desires and needs the culture introjects into me.

But what can we do when we don’t want to assimilate these beliefs and norms? How do we refuse them, stop eating them, and remove them from our bodies? What might it mean to say No to the desires the culture imposes on us?

The anorexic’s No, her refusal to eat, is a refusal of culture’s law—it is a radical and at times suicidal act. Though this refusal ensures her own demise, the anorexic persists because it is the only means to freedom. Her act of No cuts her from her world while, at the same time, it makes a space between herself and the world, a space in which her desire can exist. She creates the space for an alternative.

I’ve lived with what I consider the “structure” or internalized thinking of anorexia for nearly four decades. I’ve not usually lived inside a dangerously low body weight, but food and eating and the body are merely superficial symptoms of anorexia. I have absorbed and internalized anorexic thinking. There was a time when I had not yet consumed that way of thinking; so there was a time when I swallowed them, and there was a time when they existed outside of me. Once I began to internalize these ways of thinking the very way I thought was changed forever.

In “An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion,” Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson speak with Derrida about nourishment and consumption. They ask him, “How is this massive project on eating related to deconstruction, as we have come to know it? If understanding can be compared to a kind of eating, what would a deconstructionist reading of a text be?” Derrida replies:

It would mean respect for that which cannot be eaten—respect for that in a text which cannot be assimilated. My thoughts on the limits of eating follow in their entirety the same schema as my theories on the indeterminate or untranslatable in a text. There is always a reminder that cannot be read, that must remain alien. This residue can never be interrogated as the same, but must be constantly sought out anew, and must continue to be written.

Derrida suggests that we can only incorporate that which we understand. That which seems strange, or outside the limits of what is considered culturally acceptable, is not, then, consumable. It is refused. What does this mean, then, for those whom we don’t understand? What does it mean for those who consume their culture’s values while, at the same time, they are considered inconsumable by that very culture?

It is often too much for us—the disturbance we feel when we begin to imagine the marginalized, her pain and her struggles; this imagining hurts us. When we stop to imagine ourselves in the marginalized’s place, lost, not at home in the world, we are unable to consume this alienated feeling of being. What we cannot fathom—what we cannot “digest”—in another person and their experience persists as a remainder. This remainder is what Derrida calls the “remnant.” When we encounter this remnant, we turn away, refusing. Refused, the anorexic, the autistic, the working class, the non-white person is expected to improve herself into a consumable commodity. But that improvement is an act of violence.

And what if we are, I am, you are that marginalized person? When I erase myself, what do I become?

The anorexic meets her culture’s refusal with refusal. My anorexia, my refusal, points to a knotty contradiction—I feel myself refused and, in turn, I refuse. To be refused is to be rendered without agency. If the first refusal makes a cut in the bind between the person who rejects and the person being rejected, the second refusal cuts an already incised bind. What matters in the second refusal is the power to act, to regain agency, even if that agency is suicidal. The No saves and kills all at once. The ability to act at all is what matters.

In The Arachnean and Other Texts, a collection of essays written in the 1970s, Fernand Deligny beautifully describes the sense of alienation that occurs when he realizes his ideas do not match those of his colleagues:

Yesterday evening, I listened to two avant-garde psychiatrists on France Culture, one Italian and one French, who were in agreement on a formula according to which one should work in such a way as to treat each mental patient as a “subject.” Hence the close connection—sought by them—between their professional approach and that of political parties. Hearing them, I felt quite alone.

Deligny did not see autistic children or mentally ill patients as his colleagues did— as medical “subjects,” anonymous case studies for research, their worth reduced to the currency of such research. In other words, Deligny did not side with the powerful. Not surprisingly, Deligny’s writing is non-hierarchal. Where does that leave him, then? The Arachnean and Other Texts can be read both as a collection of Deligny’s thinking about language and power and the treatment of autistic children, and as a handbook of how to live. The structure of his writing is like a spider’s net, loose yet concise:

As for the number of “autistic children” who lived the same life as we did [in Monoblet], it had to be close to sixty. On transparent paper, we set ourselves to transcribing their pathways, wander lines, and then we held onto these lines, these traces, and looked at them and still do, through transparency; some of them date back ten years and others were made last week. For the most part, we have long since forgotten the by whom of these traces. This forgetting allows us to see “something else”: the remainder, resistant to any comprehension.

Deligny did not separate himself from the children he worked with. As Francois Dosse writes, “Deligny invented an entire poetic language to describe the behavior of young autistic patients. A child who spins is considered to be making a shadow; a child shifting from one foot to the other is making a cloud balance”. Deligny met the children where they were; he desired to learn from them and to assimilate their ways of being into his own.

Derrida’s thinking aligns with Deligny’s work with autistic children. Unless the marginalized’s language can be brought to match the dominant culture’s language, the marginalized will remain marginalized, thus reinforcing the demarcation between outside and inside that maintains the power structure of the dominant culture. Deligny and Derrida both point to the ideas of respect and recognition—they respect and recognize that a marginalized person may have her own preferred or “major” language and understand the dominant culture’s language as a “minor” one, thus inverting inside and outside; or perhaps eschewing hierarchy altogether, she may believe both languages, and perhaps several others too, are of equal value.

Clarice Lispector’s final novel, The Hour of the Star, about a young typist living in extreme poverty in the slums of Rio, can be considered an homage to the many girls in Brazil living in extreme poverty, in the same way Lispector herself grew up. Macabéa, the main character—hesitant to speak or take up space—is called an “idiot” many times by the male narrator. Of course, the reasons for her so-called idiocy are superficial (she doesn’t know who Caruso is, for example, and therefore she is not considered “cultured”) and do not in any sense relate to her intelligence.

As Pierre Bourdieu argues in Distinction, “culture” is a set of learned social skills that serve as cultural capital, and the upper classes begin implicitly and explicitly training in these skills from an early age. Without this training, Macabéa is unschooled in upper-class cultural references—she is bereft of cultural capital. And yet, the way Macabéa moves through the world demonstrates what I would call a true intelligence: she is thoughtful, curious, questioning. As the narrator writes of Macabéa: “She had what’s known as an inner life and didn’t know it. She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails. When she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams.”

Throughout the novella, Macabéa is described as noticing and seeing things that, presumably, others do not. These experiences are sensual and effect her entire being. When Macabéa went to the zoo, “[s]he was shocked to see the animals,” (and she shocked on a Sunday when she saw a rainbow: “Here I should record a joy. That the girl on a Sunday without manioc flour had an unexpected happiness that was inexplicable: by the port she saw a rainbow.”

These encounters are spiritual experiences: when Macabéa comes across something that brings her joy, she is overwhelmed by the feeling. She is nourished, filled up.

Throughout The Hour of the Star, Lispector makes references to various foods as well as to ideas of consuming. The connection she makes between class and food is often explicit: “among the dirty disorder of the lowest reaches of the middle class there was nonetheless the dull comfort of people who spend all their money on food.” Macabéa, who is poorer than those in “the lowest reaches of the middle class,” however, describes herself as being empty on “nothing.” It is not that Macabéa does not eat. Rather, she eats “Nothing.” She spends her days thinking of nothing. As Lispector writes: “Macabéa continued to enjoy thinking about nothing. Empty. Empty.”

Macabéa is able to exist in a world where she is despised, and she doesn’t wish to assimilate or change to become acceptable to that world. Refusing assimilation, Macabéa vomits frequently. Purging herself of the world she doesn’t need, Macabéa is filled with her own world, her own life. Like the anorexic in her act of No, Macabéa also refuses to consume the world—“she live[s] off her own self.” Like the anorexic, Macabéa’s refusal is a commitment to consume “Nothing.”

In The Hour of the Star food is divided between the food of the poor and that of the rich. Macabéa cannot consume the stuff of the rich, whose food itself is described as “rich.” When Macabéa does eat rich people’s rich food, she becomes sick:

Gloria lived on General so-and-so street, very pleased to live on a street named af-ter a military leader, she felt safer. In her house there was even a telephone. It might have been one of the few times that Macabéa saw that for her there was no place in the world and exactly because Gloria gave her so much. That is, a cup filled to the brim with thick real chocolate mixed with milk and many kinds of sugared buns, not to mention a small cake. Macabéa, while Gloria was out of the room—secretly robbed a cookie. Then she asked forgiveness of the abstract Being who gives and takes. She felt forgiven. The Being forgave her everything.

The next day, Monday, maybe because of the liver affected by the choco-late or because she was nervous about drinking rich people’s stuff, she got sick. She didn’t vomit afraid to waste the chocolate.

Even though swallowing the “rich chocolate” makes her ill, Macabéa doesn’t refuse it; she keeps it inside her body. Her taking in of “rich” food is an act of survival (of course she wants to escape her poverty) that nonetheless makes Macabéa sick (she does not want what her culture offers her). She is trapped in a binary—she must metaphorically “eat” what her culture gives her (hierarchies based on skin color and class and transactional relations) or “eat” nothing and starve.

The precarious material conditions of Macabéa’s life coexist with her rich inner life, but they are not obviated by it. Macabéa suffers from malnutrition and other health problems, and she will die young. She is alienated from the people in her life who do not see value in her because she exists at such a low rung of the social class—and those who are also lower class or living in poverty with Macabéa are busy aspiring to move up the rungs of the social classes. And Macabéa’s poverty creates a threshold, a barrier, between herself and the lives of those with access to this other world.

The Hour of the Star is often described as enigmatic or mysterious. Just as Lispector herself was and is. But I don’t find this to be the case at all. This mysteriousness is not because Lispector is otherworldly or odd, but, rather, because middle- and upper-middle-class writers, critics and readers cannot recognize her way of life, a life profoundly marked by the class she was born into and grew up in. As Colm Tóibín writes in “A Passion for the Void,” Elizabeth Bishop, characterizing Lispector’s oddness, wrote of her in 1963:

Clarice has been asked to another literary congress, at the University of Texas, and is being very coy & complicated—but I think is secretly very proud—and is going, of course. I’ll help her with her speech. I suppose we are going to be “friends”—but she’s the most non-literary writer I’ve ever known, and “never cracks a book” as we used to say. She’s never read anything that I can discover—I think she’s a “self-taught” writer, like a primitive painter.

In graduate school, when we discussed The Hour of the Star, the professor asked us what we thought. I said something akin to what Hélène Cixous has said about the text, that it’s a beautiful text about poverty. After the professor corrected me, telling me it was not about poverty, my classmates agreed with him.

This is the trouble with power. Those who have it often can’t see it and, therefore, can’t perceive what is not in their line of vision—their experiences of wielding power and how these experiences have informed and created their ways of understanding the world. The professor and students—indeed, every person I’ve met who has read the book—assert how strange and mysterious the text is, how odd and eccentric Lispector is, never making the connection between this so-called oddness and their own ignorance.

In the preface to The Hour of the Star, Lispector wrote: “I dedicate [this book] to the memory of my former poverty, when everything was more sober and dignified and I had never eaten lobster.” Lispector’s reference to lobster is loaded with class significance: when she was poor she had never come across such “rich” foods and, as a result, had never eaten them. Lispector’s setting “lobster” aside as a symbol of this second life (the rich life) tutors us to read Macabéa’s comsumption/non-consumption of “rich” foods as both literal and symbolic.

Much of The Hour of the Star is a working out of the complexities of one’s desire to escape poverty and precarity while, at the same time, recognizing that once you enter this other realm, your previous self has been, necessarily, annihilated. Macabéa’s eating of “rich” food is akin to Lispector’s consuming the rich life, and yet it makes Macabéa sick, and she doesn’t survive her youthful sickness into a second, rich life. Lispector’s sets her younger self aside, as if she were a character, in a work she wrote over the course of her entire life and was only able to complete as she neared her death.

In this brief dedication, Lispector achieves an incredible compression. By dedicating the book to “the memory” of her “former poverty,” she both dedicates the book to her previous self—who, like Macabéa, lived in poverty, outside the borders of society—while, at the same time, she acknowledges the seemingly ephemeral quality of her former life. She dedicates the book to “the memory” of that poverty. The Lispector who Brazilians knew was not the Lispector of this memory—they did not recognize her as such—and yet, she was, indeed, the same poor girl from Recife.

Lispector is repeatedly seen as her image—she is described over and over as glamorous and beautiful—and as the white, middle-class wife of a diplomat, a woman who remains enigmatic because people can’t make sense of how such a figure could write the books she wrote. In truth, of course, and as Lispector recounts, she was a Jewish Ukrainian woman who grew up in extreme poverty in Brazil. But people don’t recognize those fundamental aspects of Lispector, and so they don’t recognize her.

To be recognized is to be seen as one is, in our complexities, with space allotted for what cannot be understood. Ideally, then, there will remain a space between what we understand, according to our own lived experiences, and what we quite simply cannot understand.